I am so angry I’m shaking right now. After all the attention last year on the Steubenville rape, the subsequent trials, and the infuriatingly light sentences the rapists received, I hadn’t heard any news in months, so I did a quick Google search.

And guess what? Ma’lik Richmond — one of the assholes who raped an unconscious girl, who participated in the filming and distribution of what’s essentially child pornography, and who received the laughable sentence of a year in juvie — was released early for good behavior.

I hope he’s getting death threats. His victim has. I hope he doesn’t dare walk anywhere alone. I bet his victim doesn’t. I hope this ruins his life. She has to deal with it for the rest of hers. I can’t imagine the pain and humiliation and betrayal she has experienced, not only from the rape but from the fact that her peers in this small community were sharing photos and laughing at her and saying that she deserved it, that by drinking she was somehow culpable in her own assault. But you know, poor Ma’lik was only sixteen and this has been really tough on him. We should all feel bad that he couldn’t keep it in his pants and that he doesn’t know the difference between consent and unconsciousness or, given all the social media posts, does know the difference and just thinks it’s a huge joke. I’m pretty sure the girl hasn’t been laughing.

Almost as infuriating as the tap-on-the-wrist sentence is the statement his family released, in which they do not refer to or even acknowledge the victim but bemoan the “unfortunate circumstances” that have made poor Ma’lik’s life “hard.” Being a rapist is not an “unfortunate circumstance.” It is a choice. He’s done it once that we know about, and while he didn’t quite get away with it (thanks to Deric Lostutter, to whose defense fund I have donated), he got a damn light sentence. And his community seems to have overwhelmingly come down in support of him rather than his victim. So what’s going to stop him from doing it again?

This article by Australian writer Ruby Hamad says it all: Even as we claim to hate rape, we police the behaviour of young women rather than address the entitlement of young men who think girls owe them access to their bodies….when it comes to popular students and footballers, when the victim has been drinking or wearing the wrong clothes, or even when she has had consensual sex before, then the lines become blurred and suddenly the scramble is on to absolve the perpetrators of responsibility.

This post by Eve Vawter, dating back to the original coverage, also makes excellent points: I do not care how drunk a woman or girl was. She does not deserve to be raped. I do not care what a woman or girl was wearing. I do not care if Juicy Couture or Victoria’s Secret comes out with a new line of sweatpants with the words “Rape Me” emblazoned on the ass and a female person buys and wears these, she does not deserve to be raped.

Why do people think girls and women should be responsible not only for their own alcohol consumption and how they dress, but also for the alcohol consumption and behavior of boys and men?

What else can we do? After all the publicity about Steubenville, all the petitions, all the protests, all the national and even international outrage, Ma’lik Richmond walked free after nine months and hopes to get on with his life. He hasn’t apologized for his crime or even admitted he did anything wrong. He has certainly not been “rehabilitated,” because, as others have pointed out, rehabilitation would include public acknowledgment and remorse for what he did. Can’t something more be done to communicate to him, and his defenders, the seriousness of his offense? He deserves far more long-term and brutal consequences than he has faced, but unless he’s charged with additional offenses, like making and distributing child pornography, he skates free except for the mandatory registering as a sex offender. And yeah, that’s something, but it’s nowhere close to enough.

At least Ohio’s AG Mike DeWine is indicting adults who covered up the rape. This is a start. But all the kids out there who are or could be Ma’lik Richmond are watching him dance away without serving even the minimum on his sentence, watching his community rally around him and his family baby him. What kind of message is that sending them? “It’s okay, guys, we understand. Boys will be boys. If you get caught and the entire country flips out, we’ll have to give you a token penalty, but as soon as everyone’s attention moves on, we’ll let you return to business as usual. It’s all good, dude. We have your back.”

I hope there’s a special kind of hell for every single one of these rapists and rape enablers.

Edited to add: Part of why victim-blaming infuriates me so much is that it was an inherent part of the religious culture in which I was raised. In eighth grade, the male principal told my entire class that the draconian new dress code was for the protection of the girls, who didn’t always “know how to sit in short skirts” and who therefore were inadvertently inciting male teachers to lust. Effectively, this adult man was putting on us, a group of 13- and 14-year old girls, not just the responsibility for keeping our male peers from impure thoughts (which we’d been tasked with at least since sex ed the previous year, and which I doubt, given the nature of teenage boys, would be possible even if we’d all worn muumuus), but for the way adult men perceived and reacted to us.

In retrospect, I find this horrifying on all sorts of levels, not least because it sets up a pre-determined excuse for any male teacher who behaves inappropriately toward a female student — it’s her fault; she’s been warned. While I don’t know of any sexual abuse occurring by men in authority there, many of the hallmarks of situations in which religious or academic leaders perpetrate abuse (eg “don’t question me, because God put me in control of you, so if you question me you’re sinning against God”) were certainly present. What I do know is that I was subjected to intense sexual harassment, including one groping incident, by male classmates. I never reported it, not only because I feared ostracism from my peers (the harassment was blatant and public enough that everyone would have known if I’d told), but because every message I’d ever gotten from the men in charge indicated that if I complained about sexual misconduct, they would hold me just as responsible as they held the boys. They would scrutinize everything I said, everything I did, everything I wore, and come up with a way to make it my fault. Maybe I’m wrong; maybe they would have been fair to me. But nothing they had ever said or done made me believe they wouldn’t blame me. This is particularly ironic; I think the harassment was worse precisely because I was so shy and prudish that it was easy to embarrass me, easy to make everyone else laugh at my expense.